Photovoltaic Captures Sunlight to Convert Sunlight More Efficiently into Electricity

Author:Source:Datetime: 2016-10-09 14:55:15

The sun's energy supply to Earth for one hour is enough for human use for a year, however, the proportion of solar energy currently used in the world's total electricity consumption is barely 1%. Many researchers are working on solar power batteries, so that sunlight can be more efficient into electricity. While some experts have attempted to convert them into fuel using photoelectrochemical solar power batteries, it is disappointing that the conversion process has proved to be too complex and inefficient. Has found a way to improve this phenomenon.

Photoelectrochemical cells use sunlight to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. They use sunlight to convert sunlight into electrical energy to create a circuit that can run in water, and then generate electricity by electrolysis. Researchers use the lifepo4 battery is usually made of iron oxide and tungsten oxide as a material for light capture. Among them, iron oxide can absorb visible light, and tungsten oxide can absorb ultraviolet light. In addition, the tungsten oxide has a high refractive index, which means that once the light is inside the tungsten oxide plate, light will bounce back and forth due to the phenomenon of total internal reflection, which will greatly enhance the absorption opportunity. Therefore, the cooperation of iron oxide and tungsten oxide, can capture 35% of the incident sunlight.
The above theory sounds very good, but because of the very poor conductivity of iron oxide, so the above ideas into the actual equipment, the effect is still very unsatisfactory. Unless the device is in very thin form, to improve the conductivity of iron oxide, unfortunately, so they can not absorb enough sunlight to better decompose the water. One way to solve this problem is to reshape its components with lithography, and to dope other materials to change their conductivity to improve the light absorption of the lifepo4 battery pack. Although the approach is feasible, but the cost is too high.

This approach is to tungsten oxide into a few hundred nanometers in diameter sphere, and then covered with a thin layer of iron oxide. Such a design not only can maximize the internal reflection capacity, but also in the iron oxide and tungsten oxide at the junction of the reflected light by iron oxide absorption. And most importantly, researchers have figured out how to make this design cheaper. First, the researchers mixed the ammonium tungstate solution with the polymer to create a suspension of plastic droplets and allowed each droplet to contain ammonium tungstate. The mixture was then sprayed onto a piece of glass and allowed to dry. The researchers heated the glass with an oven and evaporated the plastic to convert the droplets into tungsten oxide microspheres. Finally, a large amount of ferric nitrate solution was sprayed on the surface and reheated to form an oxide Iron covering. This approach can not only better absorb sunlight, but also convert it into electrical energy. From the above analysis can be seen that the technology is very easy to promote, which means that the photoelectric electrochemical solar power battery made in this way can be popularized on the industrial level. The resulting hydrogen can be used for fuel to be sold or stored locally, and for night combustion when solar energy is not available.
Surprisingly, the researchers found that when these experiments are completed, naturally they severely beat them. The microstructures of these solar power batteries - spherical light collectors as one part of solar power generator, resemble activities that occur inside the moth's eyes. These have evolved to be able to collect as much light as possible in order to ensure that the night can be seen at the same time, in order to avoid predators found that can be as little as possible to reflect the light out of animals, also has a small absorption of light Sphere. This is as people often say, the world would have nothing new, are made by their predecessors.